In August 1935, the Red Army's Long March reached the Aba area.
There is a grassland in the Aba region, called Ruoergai, which is one of the five major grasslands in China, covering an area of 35,000 square kilometers.
Ruoergai steppe
The Ruoergai grassland is the only way for the Red Army, and unlike the enemy encirclement and artillery bombardment on the usual road, crossing the grassland is "fighting with the ground", and this is a man-eating grassland.
According to the records of the party, when the three main forces of the Red Army crossed the snow-capped mountains and meadows, the number of non-combat attrition reached more than 10,000, which shows the degree of danger here.
So, what is the main reason why the Red Army sacrificed so many people across the grasslands? Now, more than 80 years later, what changes have taken place in this "man-eating" grassland? Is it still dangerous?
"Man-eating" steppes
The Zoige grassland is a highland wetland mixed with swamps, shallow enough to drown up a person's knees and deep enough to swallow an entire adult.
When the Red Army arrived in the Aba area, the Zoige grassland was being watered by the rainy season, and the grassland was full of water, which was the most dangerous time of the year.
At that time, the marching ranks of the Red Army were divided into two routes, left and right, advancing in parallel.
Humans and animals carrying weapons need to find a force point to avoid danger as they move forward, so they must walk on the meadows.
The distance between the meadows and the meadows was far and near, so the warriors could only jump back and forth when they moved forward, and it was raining in the sky, and it was easy to fall into the swamp if they slipped under their feet.
Once the Red Army fighters fell into the swamp, it was difficult to climb up again.
At that time, everyone had no experience in the swamp, and the more the person who fell into it, the deeper he struggled, and if someone next to him reached out to pull the person who fell in, he would often bring himself into it because of the suction force of the swamp.
Later, after groping, everyone gradually gained experience in rescue, and after falling into the swamp, they slowly moved their bodies to move up, or took off the gaiters and wrapped them around the waist of the rescued person and pulled them up.
If there is no one around you when you fall into the swamp, there is little hope of saving yourself, and you often end up being swallowed by muddy water.
The muddy water in the grassland is black, precipitated with many drowned plants and animals, and after a long period of natural fermentation, it is full of all kinds of deadly bacteria.
The wounds on the legs of the soldiers, once stained with these muddy waters, were often red and swollen and festering, and the ranks lacked medicine, and eventually their limbs were amputated.
Moreover, there are many lakes and rivers in the meadows, and where the water is shallow, the warriors can wade through, and when they encounter a wide river and a fast current, it is full of danger.
According to General Huang Kecheng's recollections, once, when everyone was wading across the river, a heavy rainstorm suddenly fell in the sky, and the water rose instantly, and many people who were crossing the river were swept away by the water.
Huang Kecheng
After the rain stopped, countless corpses of Red Army soldiers lay on the grass, and the scene was so terrifying that even though decades had passed, those who came there felt palpitations every time they thought about it.
In addition to the difficulty of marching, the warriors faced another deadly enemy in the face of the ubiquitous swamps was hunger.
Food, clothing, shelter and transportation are the enemy
Before entering the meadow, the leaders of the Red Army tried every means to raise grain, and in order to carry more dry food, the cooking squad milled the collected barley into flour and fried it, and made it into fried flour for the soldiers to eat.
The cadres of the company also identified edible wild vegetables through the stories of local Tibetans and prepared for emergencies.
Although many efforts were made to raise food, only a few catties of grain were distributed to each soldier, which could not meet the consumption of a Red Army soldier on a high-intensity march.
Therefore, when the meadow was only halfway gone, everyone's food was gone, and the soldiers could only rely on digging weeds and vegetables to satisfy their hunger in order to fill their stomachs.
Some wild vegetables are poisonous, after eating, the light diarrhea, the heavy will be poisoned to death, plus a few days to eat these wild vegetables that do not have much nutritional value, many people are suffering from serious gastrointestinal diseases, one by one yellow muscles thin, limbs swollen.
But even these wild vegetables that contain toxins are not good for the warriors.
The number of wild vegetables in the meadow was limited, and the troops in front gnawed up the bark of the edible wild vegetables, and the teams passing behind could only put the belts made of cowhide, leather shoes, and even saddles and wool shoulders into the pot to cook and eat.
However, this indigestible food could not meet the daily needs of the soldiers, and in the end they had to slaughter the animals that carried the supplies to satisfy their hunger.
At that time, Peng Dehuai's Red 3rd Army was tasked with the queen of the palace, and he had to resist the pursuing troops sent by Chiang Kai-shek along the way, and he did not have much time to prepare food when he arrived across the grassland.
By the time the grass was crossed, it would not be more than two days before the troops would run out of cooking.
After Peng Dehuai learned about the situation, he called the old breeder of the military headquarters to his eyes and asked him how many animals there were in the whole regiment.
The old breeder replied that even the black mule ridden by the commander of the regiment was included, and there were still six animals in the whole regiment.
Peng Dehuai thought for a moment and ordered all six animals to be killed and used meat as food for the soldiers.
Peng Dehuai
The old breeder had already had feelings for these "comrades-in-arms" who had been with him for a long time, and he was reluctant to slaughter them, so he persuaded Peng Dehuai to think of other ways.
Peng Dehuai comforted him that he was reluctant to slaughter these "close comrades-in-arms", but the soldiers didn't even have to eat wild vegetables at the moment, and only by killing livestock could they get out of the grassland, and for the victory of the revolution, the lives of the soldiers were the most important.
The soldiers of the cooking squad slaughtered the six animals with tears in their eyes, leaving only a little offal at the regiment headquarters and distributing all the remaining meat to the various companies.
It was with this bit of meat that many of the soldiers of the Red 3rd Legion survived.
When crossing the meadows, food, clothing, shelter and transportation were the worst enemies of the warriors, and the meadows were full of mud, and at night they often had to find some drier places to camp, but these places were often also the dwellings of rats and animals.
Warriors are often bitten by rats if they are not careful.
It often rained at night, and the tarpaulins that the soldiers had put up with branches could neither shelter the rain nor the cold wind blowing from all sides.
Everyone was thinly dressed, and in order to resist the cold wind on the grass, they could only hug each other in piles to keep warm.
But even if you sleep, you don't dare to take it lightly, and if you turn over, you may roll into the swamp, so there are people on duty every night to protect everyone's safety.
Cold, hunger, and injuries permeated the entire ranks, and many of them went to bed well and never woke up the next morning.
Especially in the last days of coming out of the meadow, many people's bodies have reached the limit of what they can bear, and dozens of people die in their sleep every night.
Many soldiers did not die on the battlefield, but fell on the way across the meadow, their lives became the lights that illuminate future generations, and their bodies have also become a guide to guide their comrades.
The marching team did not need a guide, and only needed to follow the countless corpses of their comrades to find the route of the march.
Zoige Nature Reserve
After the founding of the People's Republic of China, the Zoige grassland was degraded on a large scale due to factors such as climate warming, rodent infestation, and overgrazing, and the rare wild animals and plants that had lived in the local area for many years disappeared.
In the sixties and seventies of the 20th century, in order to improve the utilization rate of grassland, the herdsmen near the Ruoergai grassland raised an agricultural movement of "agricultural village, asking for grassland from swampy wetlands".
Thousands of drainage ditches have been dug into the swampy areas of the grasslands, which local herders want to drain all the way to the Yellow River, draining the swamps.
However, instead of turning the swamp into a grassland for grazing, the soil structure hardened and began to rapidly degenerate into sand.
This agricultural campaign, which consumed huge manpower and material resources, excavated 2.1 million mu of swamps, resulting in about 1.2 million mu of water swamps turning into dry swamps, and reducing the area of wetlands by 60%.
To this day, many of the drainage ditches dug at that time are still functioning normally, which has lowered the water level of the natural lakes in the grasslands and increased the desertification.
In 1994, the Zoige Wetland National Nature Reserve was established, and attention was paid to the ecological restoration of the Zoige grassland.
For the ecological restoration of the Zoige grassland, the state and local governments have invested a lot of money to maintain the ecological balance of the region through grazing bans, grazing restrictions and rotational grazing.
In 2001, the People's Government of Aba Tibetan and Qiang Autonomous Prefecture agreed to approve the establishment of the Sichuan Ruoergai Wetland National Nature Reserve Administration, which mainly protects the alpine peat swamp wetland ecosystem and rare wild animals and plants such as black-necked cranes.
In the initial stage of management, in the face of the drainage ditches crisscrossed by ravines on the grassland, the staff of the Ruoergai county government have been focusing on plugging and filling the ditches, and have begun to maintain the water source of the marshland.
In the following years, the staff of the nature reserve built 20 drainage ditches with 66.4 kilometers of wetland restoration pilots, covering an area of more than 10,000 hectares.
In his report, the deputy director of the wetland reserve said that through a series of monitoring and the restoration of the fence and ditch, the average water level of the wetland was raised by 0.5 meters compared with before the restoration, and the restoration of the riverbed was 0.5 meters higher than before due to the siltation of the soil, which solved the problem of the decline of the groundwater level and water shortage in the sandy area.
The restoration method of "fencing and filling ditches" proved to be effective, but due to the large amount of work to restore the wetland, only more than 60 kilometers were treated at that time, and more than 300 kilometers still needed to be built.
The biggest problem encountered in the restoration process of the Ruoergai wetland is the lack of funds, and the special funds are very limited in the investment in desertification prevention and control, only a few hundred thousand yuan.
For such a large-scale restoration and management task, it can only be said that it is a drop in the bucket, and these funds can only be carried out on some pilot projects, so the scale and speed of governance are far lower than the speed of land desertification.
In the process of remediating wetlands, in addition to the damage caused by the agricultural movement of "ditching and draining" in the last century, there are three other problems that have caused the degradation of the Zoige grassland.
The three challenges are rat infestation, overgrazing and climate change.
Many experts have conducted in-depth research on the damage caused by rodents and insects, but the balance of the natural ecology is not easy to human interference, and a careless approach will cause an imbalance in the ecosystem.
Scaffolding
As a result, the staff of the above-mentioned nature reserve have adopted the traditional management method, which is "eagle catching rats".
The staff built a lot of scaffolding on the grassland to attract eagles to come and stay, and it was a very long process to control the rodent infestation in this way.
The most fundamental solution to the problem of overgrazing is to migrate local herders who have lived for generations to other areas for grazing.
Migratory herders are a major project, such as building new houses, hospitals and schools for herders, which is obviously not enough for the scarcity of finances.
Therefore, it is only possible to educate herdsmen on the idea of protecting the environment, and to disseminate to them the knowledge that they should not overgraze and destroy the ecological balance.
In addition to rodent infestation and overgrazing, the climate problem is the most difficult to solve, and it is a headache for every country in the world.
The increase in global temperatures has led to a decrease in rainfall in the Zoige region, and a decrease in rainfall in the grasslands year by year.
In order to maintain and increase the amount of rainfall, Ruoergai has implemented large-scale and high-density artificial rainfall, and the rumbling sound of "rain cannons" can be heard almost every day.
However, the change of natural weather is far from being solved by human intervention, and often after a few days of fire, it is possible to wait for a light rain, or even no rain.
Therefore, the ecological restoration of the Ruoergai grassland can be said to have a long way to go.
The main reason for grassland degradation is man-made disasters, not natural disasters, and saving Ruoergai, the most beautiful wetland grassland in China, is not a confrontation between man and nature, but a way of living in harmony between man and nature.
As the state attaches more and more importance to the ecological environment, the government of Zoige Prefecture has also established a national wetland park to attract tourists every year and accumulate funds for management work.
Resources:
1, CCTV: "[The Endless Long March] Grassland Chronicle, the Most Tragic Death March"
2. Xinhua News Agency Daily Telegraph: "The Grassland Walked by the Red Army Is Desertifying"
3. News Network of the Communist Party of China: "Death March--The Red Army's Complete Record of Crossing the Snowy Mountains and Meadows"
4. Xinhuanet: "In Ruoergai County, the Red Army's Long March - "Addition and Subtraction" on the Red Grass
5. Environmental protection: "The Ecological Nightmare of the Red Army Grassland: 70 Years of Zoige Grassland Changes" Zhao Yahui
6. Xinhua News Agency Daily Telegraph: "The Most Tragic Death March: The Red Army's Complete Record of Crossing the Snowy Mountains and Meadows" Liu Yonghua
7, to the world: "Watching Ruoergai" Li Yunheng
8. Ecological Economy: "China's Most Beautiful Wetland Ruoergai Grassland is Intensifying and Disappearing" Zhao Yahui